Shinto shrine symbolizes isle history

Visitors to the bon
dance at Hawaii's Plantation Village, by tradition the first evening bon dance
of the season, might want to pay their respects to the Wakamiya Inari Shrine, a
multifaceted symbol of the isles' cultural ties to Japan.

The Shinto shrine, which
sat in Moiliili for 70 years, was the first structure to be installed at the
Waipahu outdoor museum, which now comprises about two dozen buildings
representing Hawaii's plantation past. And while reincarnation is not
considered a main tenet of the Shinto faith, the shrine has enjoyed enough
rebirths to make one consider whether it should be.

Age and the elements had
taken their toll on the 99-year-old structure, the wind and rain ripping off
many of the shingles on its gracefully angled roofline and allowing water to
seep inside.

"The urgent, urgent
thing was to get a new roof on because it was losing shingles and we were
worried about the interior," said Bev Keever, a retired journalism
professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who is member of a small group
of activists devoted to saving the shrine.

Carpenter Brian
Schatz of Schatz Construction in Kailua installed a ridge line at the Waka­miya
Inari Shrine in the Hawaiian Plantation Village on Tuesday. The shrine was
built in 1914 in Kakaako and relocated a few years later to Moiliili, where it
sat for 70 years before being moved to the village in Waipahu.(Photo credit: Krystle Marcellus, Star Advertiser)

The shrine was built in
1914 in Kakaako and relocated a few years later to Moiliili, where it sat for
70 years. It was built at the behest of the Rev. Yoshio Akizaki, who conducted
services there and passed on his duties to his son Takeo in 1951.

In 1979 the property was
sold to the proprietors of McCully Bicycle & Sporting Goods, and the shrine
was slated for demolition. Keever remembers attending a neighborhood board
meeting at which Michael Molloy, a former religion professor at Kapiolani
Community College, announced the planned demolition and formed a group to save
it. After several attempts to find a site in Honolulu, they succeeded in
getting it moved to the Waipahu Cultural Garden Park, eventual site of the
plantation village.

"They moved it at
midnight, and they had to have police cars on the front and back, and closed
the traffic," Keever said. "It was a delicate operation."

Rebuilding the roof
required more than just replacing a few shingles. During the move to Waipahu,
some parts called "chigi" — decorative crosspieces shaped like an
"X"with a line through them —were removed, according to Lorraine
Minatoishi, a local architect who was brought in to advise the group.
"They had all been lost," said Minatoishi, who studied Japanese
architecture.

Classical Japanese
temple design calls for all elements of a structure to be of specified
proportions, from the circumference of the columns to the spans between the
columns and the overall size of a building, she said.

"It's all
interrelated. That's why it's beautiful, because everything is in the correct
proportion," she said.

The architect studied
various parts of the shrine to extrapolate the measurements for the chigi. The
pieces were then fashioned by Brian Schatz, a local carpenter (and not the U.S.
senator from Hawaii). Schatz works primarily on homes and had never done a
historic preservation project before, but he took the project seriously, even
studying another shrine roof to see how the chigi should be mounted.

Instead, he found out
"they cheated," using metal to hold them in place. He hopes to mimic
the exacting standards of Japanese carpenters to "jigsaw" the pieces
firmly in place.

"It's
carpentry," he said matter-of-factly. "I'm just trying to do it and
make it stay up there. There may be a book but it's written in Japanese."

The preservation group
received a $20,000 grant from the Freeman Foundation and collected about an
additional $7,000 for the roofing project.

"It definitely
needs some small carpentry repairs, and it needs to be painted and possibly
even landscaped," said Gail Okawa, who was part of the group in 1979 and
is still involved in the restoration despite having spent many years teaching
on the mainland. "It would just give you a much better feel of a blissful,
meditative space.

"I think it's a
fascinating part of Hawaii Japanese history, but now that it's out here, it's a
really important part of Hawaii history as a whole."